"Earlier this week, the Spanish government raided the Barcelona office of the PuntCat Foundation, the company that administers the .cat domain, and arrested one of its senior executives. PuntCat means 'dot cat' in Catalan, the language spoken in the Catalonian region of Spain as well as places in France, Andorra, and Italy. The office was raided because Catalonia hopes to hold a referendum on October 1 to decide if it should secede from Spain, and in an effort to quash the referendum, the government of Spain ordered puntCat to “block all .cat domain names that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum,” according to a press release from the foundation. This is an astonishing attempt at censorship by a member of the E.U. but, unfortunately, that aspect is going largely uncovered because the media is idiotically obsessed with cats." - Adrianne Jeffries, The Outline

According to the report, an average of 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU have pirated digital content, with Poland and Spain averaging the highest rates of all countries surveyed. Nevertheless, displacement rates (the impact of piracy on legitimate sales) were found to be negligible or non-existent for music, books and games, while rates for films and TV were in line with previous digital piracy studies.

Most interesting is the fact that the study found that illegal game downloads actually lead to an increase in legal purchases. The report concludes that tactics like video game microtransactions are proving effective in converting illegal users to paying users.

The full report goes in-depth regarding potential factors influencing piracy and the challenges of accurately tracking its impact on legitimate sales, but the researchers ultimately conclude that there is no robust statistical evidence that illegal downloads reduce legal sales. That's big news, which makes it all the more troubling that the EU effectively buried it for two years.

Back in 2014, the European Commission paid the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys 360,000 euros (about $428,000) to research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content. The final report was finished in May 2015, but for some reason it was never published– according to Julia Reda’s blog, the only Pirate in the EU Parliament.